Category: The Dish

… believes that most of the 9/11 highjackers were Iraqis.

A reader writes:

Gay Pride Parades may seem unnecessary in the US; this isn’t so everywhere. Last Thursday, I participated in the Jerusalem Gay Pride March. It is a very subdued affair – people are marching with placards and rainbow flags, none of the glamour you see in the Tel Aviv parades – yet for the last few years, there has been a strange coalition of rabbis, imams and priests against it.

Consider it for a moment: Israeli extremist rabbis, who call for the desecration of churches and the deportation of Muslims, find common ground with them for just one day in the year. Imams who routinely denounce Jews as "sons of pigs and apes", put that aside for one day. Every year, Jerusalem is engulfed in riots, as the ultra-Orthodox set trash wagons on fire and clash with the police in the days before the parade.

The parade includes both Israeli and Palestinian gays, as well as many straight people, who, like me, think it is a battle front which must not be abandoned. In 2005, an ultra-Orthodox nutjob stabbed three of the marchers, screaming he did so in the name of God; he is now a minor hero of the ultra-Orthodox community. As a result, in 2006 the police have all but said they cannot secure the parade, and instead of it, a happening took place – in a secure, remote location, surrounded  by thousands of policemen.

This year the parade marched – for 500 meters. The police said they couldn’t guarantee anything more than that. The marching route was considered a "sterile zone", and was cordoned; snipers took positions on many roofs along the route; helicopters kept buzzing over it. And the police seized an ultra-Orthodox wiho attempted to get near the paraders, having in his position an improvised pipe bomb.

"Anachronistic relic"? In New York, perhaps.

This, we now know, is how the U.S. came to endorse the torture of military and CIA detainees. It was done by stealth, with none of the customary legal and constitutional safeguards. It was done by vice-president Dick Cheney in what may by historians be regarded as an internal coup – against the country, and against the law:

Three days after the Ashcroft meeting, Cheney brought the order for military commissions to Bush. No one told Bellinger, Rice or Powell, who continued to think that Prosper’s working group was at the helm. After leaving Bush’s private dining room, the vice president took no chances on a last-minute objection. He sent the order on a swift path to execution that left no sign of his role. After Addington and Flanigan, the text passed to Berenson, the associate White House counsel. Cheney’s link to the document broke there: Berenson was not told of its provenance. Berenson rushed the order to deputy staff secretary Stuart W. Bowen Jr., bearing instructions to prepare it for signature immediately – without advance distribution to the president’s top advisers. Bowen objected, he told colleagues later, saying he had handled thousands of presidential documents without ever bypassing strict procedures of coordination and review. He relented, one White House official said, only after "rapid, urgent persuasion" that Bush was standing by to sign and that the order was too sensitive to delay.

And so the US effectively withdrew from the Geneva Conventions. Enemy combatants would never have been granted full POW Geneva status, but they would have been assured minimal Article 3 protection, which would have safeguarded them from the torture Cheney was clearly determined to conduct. As it happened, of course, the torture did not only occur at Gitmo, and it did not only occur to those detained in Afghanistan. It spread throughout the theater of war, in Iraq and beyond – in part because torture, once approved, always spreads, and in part because of the anonymous and unaccountable way in which it was initiated.

No vice-president has the right to do this, to change the basic morality of the United States, to undermine its laws, withdraw from its treaty obligations, and do so without even consulting other individuals within the executive branch, let alone the Congress.

And yet Cheney, in a vice-presidential power-grab unparalleled in U.S. history, didn’t only do it; he did it in such a way as to deny his own accountability and responsibility.

Stealth is among Cheney’s most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney’s office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

The phrase "law unto himself" comes to mind.

(Photo: Stephen Chernin/Getty.)

Georgetown, South Carolina, 4.25 pm.

For a freshly updated, interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

Fareed Zakaria makes an important point about the advantages we actually have in countering Islamist fundamentalism:

The split between Sunnis and Shiites—which plays a role in Lebanon as well—is only one of the divisions within the world of Islam. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners and, importantly, moderates and radicals. The clash between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories is the most vivid sign of the latter divide. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so the many varieties of Islam weaken its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. It would be even less dangerous if Western leaders recognized this and worked to emphasize such distinctions. Rather than speaking of a single worldwide movement—which absurdly lumps together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon and Sunni jihadists in Egypt—we should be emphasizing that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies and friends. That robs them of their claim to represent Islam. It describes them as they often are—small local gangs of misfits, hoping to attract attention through nihilism and barbarism.

And yet Romney and Giuliani spend their entire time conflating all these different entities for domestic rhetorical purposes. We really cannot afford such foreign policy stupidity in the White House. Eight years is enough.

From the annals of liberal busy-body hell: what you can and cannot say when trying to rent or sell an apartment in New York City.

A reader writes:

Ordinarily I might be inclined to agree that the soft power of the poodle (the toy variety, of course) could give one pause to wonder, "Who is walking whom?"  But that suggests that Bush is the one at the business end of the leash.  The only tether that really matters in Washington for the next 16 1/2 months is the one Dick Cheney feeds out just far enough to keep himself from accounting for actions done in the name of his own poodle.  In fact, this is more like the kind of child-leash that parents use to give their offspring the illusion of independent action.  The Blair-Poodle is merely an enhancement of the illusion.

Condi Rice says it again. Jeff Weintraub notices.

Michael Ledeen quotes a famous general complaining that

we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers!

I think it’s Michael’s attempt to persuade people that what the media is reporting – the failure of the surge in Iraq – is to be ignored in favor of generals who know how to win the war. Except the quote is from Robert E. Lee. D’oh!

A reader writes:

I don’t even know where to start with your "Dissent of the Day". I’m sure they would dismiss me as "tone-deaf" on Hillary too, but objectively, I can’t grasp what is so special about an ex-president’s wife running for president. I would also love to see a woman president, but not one that owes her prominence to her man. And that is the bottom line with Hillary – without the exposure she got as First Lady, she would not be a Senator or a serious contender to the presidency.  Sorry – it is your "dissenter" that is tone-deaf … and apparently blind.

Hillary Clinton had a chance to pioneer feminism. But she preferred her own ambition to her alleged principles, and when it really came down to it, she deferred to a man. Bill came first, however brutally he humiliated and used her. But she knew her place – and coped by trying to leverage it for more power. A profile in feminist courage she has never been. Too risky. When it comes to feminist pioneering, she’s less Margaret Thatcher than Cory Aquino.